Godzilla 2000 is not that kind of "bad" movie. It is an exceptionally
cheesy movie with surprisingly good production values (which Godzilla
movies are generally not known for). It's the kind of movie that a Bad Movie
Night or MST3K fan can watch and really, really enjoy. And in certain scenes,
you can even tell that the filmmakers' tongues were planted firmly in cheek.

The movie opens with the Godzilla Prediction Network (no, really!) setting up a
big antenna and tuning in to Godzilla's radio frequency. Or Godzilla's cosmic
ray emissions. Or Godzilla's remote lizard-breath field. Or something. (Good
physics has never been the strong suit of Godzilla movies, and I had no reason
to suspect it would change for this film.) Our hero, his daughter, and a girl
reporter you just know is going to end up marrying the hero in the end,
all go racing through the countryside in their SUV chasing after Godzilla in a
manner that looks AWFULLY reminiscent of Twister. Finally, they meet
face-to-face with the G-man himself. Godzilla looks a little different than in
previous movies (though not NEARLY as different as that awful
Alien/Tyrranosaurus crossbreed from the 1998 Devlin/Emmerich Godzilla).
The spines on Godzilla's back are bigger and more jagged, his snout no longer
looks like a Scotch terrier's, and he has more teeth. He's still obviously some
guy in a rubber lizard suit, though. Stunned by this new make-over, our heroes
are nearly turned into little wet spots on the pavement when everyone's
favorite 80-meter-tall firebreathing lizard swats at them. Godzilla then
decides to step on a power plant.

Typical monstrous rampage? No no no. Godzilla is secretly trying to save
us by stepping on that power plant! He's on our side! And, um, we're
supposed to ignore the whole swatting-at-our-heroes incident as just some
good-natured ribbing. Yeah, that's it. That's the ticket.

You see, unbeknownst to our heroes but beknownst to us, the hero's arch-rival
(who works for ConHugeCo and explits child laborers or something so that we'll
all hate him) has discovered a giant meteorite lying at the bottom of the
ocean. But when his recovery team shines its underwater flashlights on it ...
it wakes up! (Dramatic chord.) It ascends to the surface of the ocean
under its own power, then keeps on ascending until it's floating above
the water when the sun shines on it, and finally flies off toward Japan. I
swear I am not making this up.

Meanwhile, Godzilla continues his rampage, taking out one power plant after
another. The Japanese army (they have an army now?) moves its tanks and planes
into position and unleashes their newest weapon, a super duper whiz-bang wow
jeepers armor-piercing missile. Their heightened special effects budget
actually allows them to score DIRECT hits on Godzilla this time. But to no
avail. You can't keep the G-man down!

However, just when we think we're about to get some good
scale-model-of-Tokyo-stompin' action, the flying meteorite shows up and
captures Godzilla's attention. It swoops down over the Japanese troops, making
a tremendous roar, whereupon one of the troops bleats out (in perhaps the
movie's cheesiest moment), "Did you see that flying rock go by?!". (You'll
really have to see it to understand why this line is so cheesy.) One of the
crevices on the meteorite turns out to be the Wave-Motion Gun from Space
Cruiser Yamato. (Or at least, that's what it looked like.) Godzilla gets
blasted. Godzilla counter-attacks with his new souped-up fire breath special
effects, which are powerful enough in this movie to blast part of the
meteorite's outer layers clear. Underneath, we see the gleam of a
computer-generated flying saucer.

The movie slows down here for about half an hour. Both Godzilla and the
meteorite/UFO have taken each other down for the count. Godzilla retreats, and
the UFO just kinda falls down. The hero's evil twin brother — er, excuse
me, his not-blood-related arch-rival — ties the UFO down with
"unbreakable" cables, which the UFO promptly breaks. The UFO lands on top of
the talles building in Tokyo. Suddenly, files start disappearing from people's
laptops. If the UFO can't steal the city's energy ('cause Godzilla trashed all
the power plants), it'll steal the city's data!

(This is the movie version of computer science: Whenever someone reads a file,
the original automatically gets erased. And, um, data is measured in
kiloWatt-hours, so if you steal enough data you can power a spaceship. Good
thing nobody was wearing virtual reality goggles in this movie, or else they'd
all die when their files were erased, since everybody knows that if you die in
the virtual world you die in the real world too. Gah.)

The girl reporter does what Lois Lane would do, and sneaks into the building
the UFO is sitting on top up so that she can tap into its data stream and see
what's going on. Of course, the hero's evil arch-rival decides to plant
explosives in this same building in an attempt to foil the UFO's plans, and so
the hero must race to the building to get her out of there. There's lots of
computer displays and stairwells and a red convertible sports car, and
everybody makes it out just in the nick of time. (Such an original
twist! I'll bet Hollywood wishes they'd though of having movie heroes
escape "just in time." That's never been done before. Not that I'm being
sarcastic, nooooooo.)

Thanks to the computer digging the girl reporter did, we now know that the UFO
is after Godzilla's DNA. It wants to get its hands on that fantastic
Wile-E-Coyote-like "healing factor" that allows Godzilla to be perfectly unhurt
at the beginning of every movie despite having been pounded to near-death in
the previous movie. So when Godzilla shows up to fight the UFO, the UFO sends a
few menacing-looking tendrils out to snatch some of Godzilla's skin cells. Then
we all stand back and stare in awe at the UFO's computer-generated graphics
budget, as it transforms itself into ... a clone of the Godzilla from the
Devlin/Emmerich Godzilla movie!

The real Godzilla, of course, isn't going to let the Devlin/Emmerich Godzilla
get its way. He has his pride, after all. They get in a big fight, there's a
lot of energy blasts and fire breath, and finally the G-man defeats the evil
mock American-Godzilla clone by letting the clone eat him. Oh, and the hero's
arch-rival gets his just deserts by acting too pompous.

The last lines of the movie are classic:

"Why does Godzilla always come to our rescue?"
"Maybe because there's a little bit of Godzilla in all of us."
Whereupon Godzilla turns around and torches the entire city.